Tag: changes

  • 5 Lessons 10th Edition Warhammer 40,000 Should Learn From Age of Sigmar

    5 Lessons 10th Edition Warhammer 40,000 Should Learn From Age of Sigmar

    Games Workshop’s flagship tabletop wargames are just as distinct as they are similar. Both games have developed in parallel over the past few years and still have lessons to learn from one another. With Warhammer 40,000’s 10th edition just around the corner, now’s the time to theorize what the new rules set might look like.

    5. Remove the Psychic Phase

    This lesson could just as easily be learned from the success of Horus Heresy’s 2nd edition, but Age of Sigmar similarly benefits from the removal of a dedicated magic phase. Whether you prefer being able to move before or after casting spells, cleaning up unnecessary complexity will go a long way toward making Warhammer a more approachable game for everyone.

    4. Improve Overwatch

    Neither 40k’s Overwatch nor Age of Sigmar’s Unleash Hell are perfect by any means, but the disparity between which models/factions can actually take advantage of their respective anti-charge mechanics shows a clear favor towards the fantasy approach. Unleash Hell allows the defending player to shoot their opponent at a -1 to hit deficit after a successful charge move is made. These two changes in conjunction make for a much more impactful mechanic, but one or the other alone might make Overwatch more than a niche universal strategem.

    3. Adjust Secondary Objectives to be More Reactive

    No plan survives first contact with the enemy, although the current rules for Warhammer 40k wouldn’t show it. Locking each player into three secondary choices from the onset of a match does little to encourage flexibility and quick thinking from players. Age of Sigmar’s Battle Tactics may not be lauded for their design, but they at least allow players to react to what has already happened on the battlefield and change their plans accordingly.

    2. Simplify Morale

    Why Morale involves two separate dice rolls is beyond me. Everyone complains that morale doesn’t matter enough, so having something more similar to Sigmar’s battle shock might help kill two birds with one stone; that or it could just give folks more things to complain about.

    1. Free Warlord Traits and Relics

    Warhammer is always in flux, so this may simply be a symptom of a specific meta-game that we will soon forget. However, 9th edition’s recent change to force players to pay Command Points pre-game to select warlord traits and relics is something I would immediately reverse. Building a list is an engaging part of the process for many different players and forcing them to sacrifice a vital resource to access flavorful aspects of their army is antithetical to allowing players to differentiate themselves and their lists.

    What do you want to see most of Warhammer 40,000’s 9th edition? Let me know in the comments below.

  • 5 Necessary Changes in 10th Edition Warhammer 40,000

    5 Necessary Changes in 10th Edition Warhammer 40,000

    An inexperienced wargamer might be surprised to find that Warhammer 40,000 is both Games Workshop’s most popular game and a complete mess. With decades of success and a devoted fan base, 40k has surpassed every other game in the industry by a large margin. This success has come at a dire cost; legacy rules and mechanics add to the overwhelming sense that Warhammer in space is as bloated and hard to grok as it is compelling to new players. 9th edition introduced a nearly unimpeachable foundation for gameplay and then added more rules and stratagems than any reasonable person has the patience to wade through. With a new edition on the horizon, here are a few suggested changes to make Warhammer 40k more fun for everyone.

    Stratagems

    Similar to Command Abilities in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, Stratagems offer players abilities outside of their unit’s datasheets. Both games offer a set of universal abilities that all players have access to, but Warhammer 40k leans much more heavily into each player’s individual stratagems. An average codex has two pages devoted to these abilities and it can be difficult for even experienced players to track which stratagems relate to which units or specific gamestates. 

    Solution: Simply expanding the set of universal stratagems, cutting down the overall number, and moving them to specific data sheets will help remove some of the bloat that 9th edition introduced while also making the interesting abilities easier to remember and therefore use effectively.

    Rules Bloat

    Solution: Get rid of 10-20% of superfluous rules and relegate them to a specific game mode, preferably not Matched Play. 

    The main difference between Age of Sigmar and 40k is the degree to which each mechanic helps support the overall flavor of the game and story that the players are trying to tell. Age of Sigmar has fewer rules and better flavor expression, while 40k is extremely bloated and still fails to execute on replicating the lore that makes players start playing in the first place. 

    Number Crunch

    Having to track primary and secondary objective points, command points, experience points, and other various numbers at any given time while primarily using 6-sided dice makes my smooth brain wince. Counting to 100 is an incredibly inefficient use of a player’s time and mental stack.

    Solution: Move the decimal point over one and make numbers smaller and easier to grok. Instead of having 100 point games, make 10 points the maximum instead. This will require the scoring system to be adjusted accordingly, but it will also make the game easier to play without sacrificing anything of value.

    Flavor Expression

    As mentioned previously, Warhammer 40,000 suffers from having incredibly interesting lore and gameplay that fails to live up to the storytelling that precedes it. Factions like the Adeptus Mechanicus and Necron share very similar space mechanically but have drastically different flavor, while the Adeptus Astartes are carbon copies of one another with the exceptions of Space Wolves and Blood Angels. Another ~33% of the model range is devoted to Space Marines but angry, without many shades of nuance in between. Some of the scariest alien menaces known to mankind end up being as weak as wet tissue paper on the tabletop.

    Solution: Of the fewer rules that remain post-debloating, ensure that those rules do a better job expressing the individual faction’s background lore. Differentiate between factions that have similar themes and ensure that everyone has something interesting to do. Reinforcing how the remaining rules express how cool the world of Warhammer 40,000 is would do wonders toward making a better game.

    Skill Expression

    Despite Games Workshop’s best intentions, Warhammer 40,000 is a competitive game with a growing community of professional players. That being said, there are a few mechanics that cause repetitive game states and leave opponents in a situation where they can predict their opponent’s strategy without much agency to do anything about it. Some data sheets provide a jack-of-all-trades profile priced in such a way that makes other similar options inefficient in Matched Play. 40k even offers a few factions stratagems to help players subvert skill testing abilities and just “do the thing!” Letting players do cool stuff is essential, but making them actually do something of note to achieve it will both make their opponents feel better for losing and make the active player feel more clever for having overcome the hurdle.

    Solution: Leaving players with fewer catch-all tools and forcing them to overcome unexpected obstacles will increase player skill expression while reducing the amount of feel bads felt from losing in the same way each match.

    As Age of Sigmar’s development has successfully trended towards simpler, more expressive gameplay, Warhammer 40,000 has several opportunities to learn similar lessons while remaining a distinct game with its own quirks. Warhammer does not need a universal ruleset. Instead, Games Workshop should let the left hand know what the right hand is doing and learn lessons from the development of its other products and other tabletop wargames in general.